Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/how-actually- ... brainwashe

How to actually enjoy your incredibly inane and stupid job
now and then without becoming a brainwashed zombie



Greta Christina's 30 ways to improve your working life.


"If there's something you've got to do and a way to enjoy it, you'd be a fool to do it any other way."
Thomas Disch, "On Wings of Song"

Hello, and welcome to the Creative Employment Opportunity (CEO) School of Employee Empowerment. The following techniques will help make it possible for you to actually enjoy a reasonable portion of the long and tedious hours you spend creating profit for other people. With regular practice and steady application of these methods, you should be able to turn to your advantage any number of work situations that at best you'd rather not be at and at worst you despise down to the very nuclei of your blood cells. Please note: None of these techniques involves developing a good attitude, cultivating a genuine commitment to the company, or taking your job seriously.

1. Have sex fantasies (if you work in the sex industry, castration fantasies may be more effective for you).

2. Go into the bathroom and masturbate.

3. Call your friends on the phone.

4. Experiment with just how much you can make a personal phone call sound like company business.

5. Make friends with the people you work with. (Many pop psychologists disparage closeness with workmates, claiming that it dissolves important boundaries or creates a confusing work environment. This is corporate propaganda and, as such, should be ignored. It may not be a great idea to actually fuck the people you work with, but having genuine friends at your job can make working there somewhat less fossilizing and perhaps even marginally pleasant. It also makes it easier to waste valuable company time).

6. Impersonate your boss. (It is essential that you complete step 5 before attempting this technique. Failure to do so may result in severe embarrassment and/or loss of your job.

7. Talk about your life. This will help you remember that you have one. It has the additional benefit of wasting valuable company time. However, for the sake of your intelligence and imagination as well as the sanity of your workmates, please severely limit the amount of time you spend discussing television shows.

8. Have more sex fantasies. (Yes, we know, we said this already, but it's an important technique and is worth repeating. If you haven't had a good sex fantasy in the last hour, it's time for another. Try the one about the 13th century French Crusader and the Arabian aristocrat.)

9. Have non-sexual fantasies. Make up an elaborate imaginary world in which you are brilliant and fearless and noble and wise and charming and passionate and gifted and graceful and hauntingly beautiful to boot; a world in which everyone you touch is changed forever, even your enemies grudgingly admire you, and anyone who ever sneered at you finally realizes just how much they've misjudged you.

10. Make faces at people you talk to on the telephone.

11. Make faces at people who are trying to talk on the telephone.

12. Make faces at your boss behind his/her back.

13. Stare blankly out the window (assuming you have access to one. If you don't, the wall will do almost as well.) Hold a pen thoughtfully and purposefully in your hand: done correctly, this will deceive your boss into believing that you're actually thinking about your job.

14. Play weird little mind games with your mindless tasks. If you slave over endless pages of essentially random numbers, try to find weird mathematical patterns in them. If you word process, see how many paragraphs begin with the letter "W." If you do data entry, play a few good rollicking rounds of Guess The Zip Code. If you empty the wastebaskets, try to imagine the personalities of the people who use them.

15. Invent time-saving efficiency working techniques to give you more time in which to fuck off.

16. Invent new ways of making your personal projects look like company business.

17. Have even more sex fantasies. (I really can't emphasize strongly enough the importance of this technique. Keeping your libido alive is probably the most fun you can have subverting the dominant paradigm. If you're bored with the Crusades, try the one about the FBI agent and the bootlegger's lover.)

18. Experiment with just how far you can push the dress code.

19. Experiment with just how far you can stretch your breaktime/lunchtime/arrival-and-departure time.

20. Experiment with just how drunk/high you can get on your lunch hour without fucking up your position. (This technique only works if you are not an addict. If you are an addict, it will most likely have very limited entertainment value.)

21. Go into the bathroom and masturbate some more. (What are they going to do, give you grief about the amount of time you spend on the crapper? Well, okay, they might. If this happens, explain that you have stress-related constipation, and issue vaguely threatening hints about workman's compensation, rising insurance costs, and/or possible lawsuits.)

22. Use the word processor to write letters to your friends. Use the postage machine to mail them.

23. Find new and ingenious ways to annoy your boss that you can't actually be fired for.

24. Computer games, computer games, computer games!

25. Have another sex fantasy. Don't be shy--you owe it to yourself! Always remember that you are a beautiful and unique human being, no matter how crummy your job makes you feel. You deserve to have dozens of sex fantasies every day of your life.

26. Plan your evening.

27. Plan your weekend.

28. Plan your next vacation.

29. Plan your life after the workers' revolution comes and you don't have to work at this stupid fucking job anymore!

30. Plot the workers' revolution.

If you feel that this lesson has been helpful but are in need of further assistance, please consult our second-level instruction manuals, How To Look Industrious And Responsible While Doing Your Own Creative Work On Company Time and 101 Sex Fantasies To Keep You Entertained During An Otherwise Tedious Workday.

--Greta Christina

[American Dream]

Mosquita y Mari

[American Dream]

” I would like to acknowledge that we carry legacies of abuse, trauma and violence with us everyday, into our work, into our relationships, into this room. Our stories about gender and race and class and ability and size and immigration and family are carried in our bodies, breath and spirit …AND we also bring legacies of resistance and survival and love in the face of silence and erasure that carry us through, we bring those into this room as well and they are also with us all the time. We bring legacies of resiliency that are deep and strong and which we are a part of. And in all of our work we have a responsibility to grow and cultivate resiliency, just as much as we resist the current systems at work. We must not only fight against the world we currently have, but also be working to create the kind of world that is inspired by our deepest desires for our selves, our families (whom ever they may be, including chosen family) and our communities.”

--Mia Mingus

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

I want to live in a world where there isn’t a hierarchy of relationships, where romantic love isn’t assumed to be more important than other kinds, where folks can center any relationships they want whether it be their relationship to their spiritual practice, kids, lovers, friends, etc. and not have some notion that it’s more or less important because of who or what’s in focus. I want to feel like I can develop intimacy with people whether we are sleeping together or not that I will be cared for whether I am romantically involved with someone or not. I want a community that takes interdependency seriously that doesn’t assume that it’s only a familial or romantic relationship responsibility to be there for each other.

I didn’t just dream this way of relating to each other up. Other cultures and communities throughout time have had more options in terms of how they construct connection. And we are doing it now. Folks are creating interdependent relationships and community that disrupt popular perceptions of appropriate partnering. I just wonder what it will take to get more of us to honestly evaluate the realities of our love and determine whether we are actually getting what we want. Love is abundant, not scarce. Why would we ever want to limit or narrow its flow?


(Source: www.crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com)

[American Dream]

“Justice and friendship require accountability. Accountability calls for us to speak clearly to those who have done things that have had hurtful impact on others. Without accountability, there can be no transformation. Accountability means owning up to the impact our actions have had on others, even if that impact was NOT the intention and working to make amends.”

— —Yolo Akili

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Jayne Cortez and the Firespitters


There It Is

My friend
they don't care
if you're an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake

They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you

And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes

The ruling class will tell you that
there is no ruling class
as they organize their liberal supporters into
white supremist lynch mobs
organize their children into
ku klux klan gangs
organize their police into killer cops
organize their propaganda into
a devise to ossify us with angel dust
pre-occupy us with western symbols in
african hair styles
inoculate us with hate
institutionalize us with ignorance
hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed
to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away
And we are programmed to self destruct
to fragment
to get buried under covert intelligence operations of
unintelligent committees impulsed toward death
And there it is

The enemies polishing their penises between
oil wells at the pentagon
the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances
the old folks dying of starvation
the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs
the lifeblood of the earth almost dead in
the greedy mouth of imperialism
And my friend
they don't care
if you're an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a shithead or a snake

They will spray you with
a virus of legionnaire’s disease
fill your nostrils with
the swine flu of their arrogance
stuff your body into a tampon of
toxic shock syndrome
try to pump all the resources of the world
into their own veins
and fly off into the wild blue yonder to
pollute another planet

And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever

And there it is

[American Dream]

we hope that we all stop settling for an exploitative system built to oppress, and instead that we are all strong enough to build something completely new and utterly beautiful.

—Walidah Imarisha

[American Dream]

Heteropatriarchy is the building block of US empire…in order to colonize peoples whose societies are not based on social hierarchy, colonizers must first naturalize hierarchy through instituting patriarchy. In turn, patriarchy rests on a gender binary system in which only two genders exist, one dominating the other… Any liberation struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or white supremacy.

—Andrea Smith, from Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy

[American Dream]

We are all tied in a single garment of destiny, … caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of all reality.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

"Welcome to the show!"

[Dan Rather] "Today, more drugs are coming into America than ever before"
"We have the best intelligence in the world, we can stop anything we wanna stop"
"You still may know little about" - Dan Rather
"The C.I.A.'s involvement with drug lords"
"This was a, a multi-billion dollar business"
"Even more menacing" - D.R. "The C.I.A."
[D.R.] "Have gone into the drug trade, and are trying to take over the government"
"In the war", "on drugs" - D.R.
"Which side is the C.I.A. on?"
"We need a change! We need a change.."

[American Dream]

[American Dream]